


a forever wound

by crownedcarl



Series: fleeting and fixed [2]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rape Aftermath, Statutory Rape, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-14 11:37:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16912164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crownedcarl/pseuds/crownedcarl
Summary: “I’m just sick,” Archie confesses, “Of feeling ill.”





	a forever wound

**Author's Note:**

> follow-up to summer dissolves in my mouth. title from lydia havens, anthem for anxiety

Archie is sixteen. Sixteen years old, still, despite the past year feeling like it’s aged him a decade in the short span between summer and fall.

He’s still here, in this town, still surrounded by the same people, and no matter how hard he tries to agree with his dad and tell himself that’s a good thing, having a support system, it doesn’t make the feeling of suffocating any easier. It still has a chokehold on him, the anxiety and the depth of it. Normal isn’t what it used to be.

Sometimes, he goes to therapy. Only sometimes, though, because after the explosion of emotion that urges him to go and talk it out, Archie ends up feeling empty and weightless, like there’s nothing left to talk about. It doesn’t go away, but it gets close enough that Archie convinces himself help is something other people - weaker people - need. Not him.

For a while, Archie thought normal was something he needed to escape from. Lately, sleepless and jittery, he wishes for that normalcy back, wishing for that time before Grundy ever put her hands on him back.

-

“That’s not what I said,” doctor Morgan says, her eyes measured behind her glasses, looking at Archie with a carefully expressionless face. “Everyone needs help, sometimes. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Archie shrugs, not meeting her eyes. “Normal people don’t need this,” he mutters. “I’m sick of feeling crazy. I’m sick of-”

Doctor Morgan puts her hands in her lap, folded together. “Sick of what, Archie?” she prompts, and Archie leans his head back against the green wall behind him, picking at a hangnail, hands twisting into the hem of his sweatshirt. He stubbornly refuses to answer for a moment, but eventually, the silence becomes worse than his own jumbled thoughts.

“I’m just sick,” Archie confesses, “Of feeling ill.”

-

Guilt.

Maybe that’s all he gets to take away from this experience. Maybe that’s better than what most people get, because Archie has been so lucky to end up here, able to wake up and breathe and move through the hours like he’s not nauseous every damn day, still jumping at shadows of slender, blonde women passing in front of him.

He feels so fucking guilty, though. There’s no visible end to that.

Sometimes, he wonders if Reggie and the guys on the football team are right in thinking that kids like Archie are lucky to have had a shot with someone like Grundy, but it takes only a moment to remember how she built him up only to tear him down, a cold feeling wrapping around his throat like a noose.

The first time he thinks about girls again after Grundy, in only the vaguest terms, Archie tries to imagine someone like Betty in his arms and soft lips against his own when a jarring thought strikes him like a hot iron to the chest: _you’re not clean,_ it says.

Archie isn’t the kind of guy that cries a lot, but a strange feeling settles over him, conviction and bile rising inside of him. He presses a hand over his mouth, the other digging into his hair, scratching at his scalp, the familiar sounds of his dad moving around downstairs becoming a distant and unwelcome background noise. Archie stays curled up at the foot of his bed, not moving for a long time, wondering if the mean little voice in the back of his head is ever going to shut up.

-

“I miss you, you know.”

Veronica has always been straight to the point. “You never text me back,” she laments, sitting across from Archie at lunch, her mesmerizing, long nails tapping on the table. Grundy kept hers short and neat. Still left scratches, though.

“Sorry,” Archie offers, unwrapping his yogurt, little plastic spoon dipping in. “I’m busy, that’s all. You know I’m allowed to have a life, right?”

He’s aiming for a mild, teasing tone, but Veronica’s face scrunches up and her eyebrows pull together. For all that Archie has never been smart, he knows what that face and others like it mean. He’s made someone angry.

The breath rattles out of him like someone’s suckerpunched him in the gut. “Of course you are,” Veronica agrees, mouth pursing, one hand tentatively reaching across the table to coax Archie’s fingers into her own, “You’re here and I still miss you. That’s kind of stupid, I know, but that’s how I feel.”

Archie has spent months grieving for a life he never got to experience, all because of one woman and her hold on him. Veronica is sitting right in front of him, across from him, but the distance has been building for a while now, there’s no denying that. It’s his fault. Most things are.

Doctor Morgan wants him to make an effort not to use self-deprecating language, he remembers, then grimaces. “I’m sorry,” Archie repeats, because he’s been saying that a lot lately, almost on autopilot. “I don’t know, Ronnie. How can things be the same, after everything that’s happened?”

He means after everything that’s happened to him, to this town, to this entire world filled with people hurting day in and day out, and Veronica looks at him like she understands, nodding softly. Maybe Archie will never love her the way he so desperately wants to be capable of, but he loves her all the same, feeling himself smiling slightly.

“Maybe they can’t be,” Veronica sighs, resting her chin in her hand, tracing the back of Archie’s hand with her thumb. It makes him swell with pride, the fact that he doesn’t flinch. “New doesn’t always mean bad, though. Like you.”

“What about me?”

Her smile is kinder than it’s ever been before. “You’re brand new, Archie. There’s so much going on, every day, and you’re doing better than most.”

Last night, Archie came across an article, something random that ended up being shared on his news feed, but he remembers it clearly; it takes the body seven years to replace the old skin with the new.

Seven years, Archie thinks, like a goal, like a milestone, like a hope. Seven years until there isn’t a single inch of him left that Grundy ever touched.

-

Maybe it’s anticlimactic, the way it all ends up happening.

His dad is watching TV, Vegas sleeping at his feet when Archie approaches hesitantly in the doorway, not knowing what to do with his hands.

Archie has been reading. He’s scuffing his toes into the carpet when his dad says “What are you lurking for?” and pats the empty spot on the couch, where there’s enough space for Archie to sit without them ever touching, and the gesture makes him want to cry. Not even his dad is a safe place, lately, and Archie knows that must hurt.

“Did you know,” Archie starts, his voice weak, “That, um, thirty percent of childhood and adolescent sexual assault victims are statistically going to be revictimized?”

He can see his dad freezing, face illuminated by the TV screen. “I know,” Archie makes himself say, “That you and everyone else keeps trying to tell me it’s not my fault, that it’s _hers,_ but how does that make sense if I’m just - just fucking doomed to do it all over again? I don’t want to, dad, but I’m already not clean, so if it happens again, how is that not my fault?”

He doesn’t really even know what answer he’s looking for or which one he wants to hear or if those two things are even remotely the same, but while Archie’s face crumbles and his hands clench into fists, his dad stands up, rubbing at his face, eyes dark and unbearably sad.

“Archie,” his dad starts, “Remember what I used to say, back when you were little? How you looked at the whole world with wonder, wanting to trust it and all the people in it? I bet you don’t, but your mom used to say it, too.”

It’s been a long time since Archie has seen his dad cry, unable to move as the tear tracks begin to form on his dad’s cheeks. “It is not your fault,” his dad says, voice trembling, “That that woman looked at you and saw how goddamn _good_ you were and decided to take advantage, and so help me god, Archie, you are still that boy to me. You are always going to be best thing I ever did.”

“But I’m already ruined,” Archie says, voice soft. “I don’t feel the same, anymore.”

No amount of therapy or self-help books have managed to prepare Archie for the weight of the world coming crashing down on him, but all it takes is a look and a sob from Fred Andrews and the horrible, choked “I wish you believed me, son,” that lands in the space between the two of them, nobody saying anything for the rest of the night.

-

“Not yet.”

“When?”

Archie presses his lips together, arms crossed in front of his chest. Doctor Morgan’s smile is gentle and amused, her coffee and his tea sitting side by side on the little table between her chair and his perch on the couch. “Next week,” he finally decides, “I’ll bring it by next week. You can’t - laugh, though.”

“I won’t,” doctor Morgan promises, knowing what the writing means to Archie, even the parts that don’t make it into songs - maybe even especially the parts he deliberately leaves out, trying to alleviate his own heartache. “I just want you to be able to write and express yourself without trying to push it into being for anyone else’s benefit. It can be just for you, but sharing can sometimes help.”

“How long does it take?” Archie asks, glancing up at her. “Before it gets better? Before I get better?”

Doctor Morgan’s kind eyes never leave his face. “It’s not a race,” she reminds him, “And there’s no deadline, no moment of truth. You know this. Eventually, it gets better. _You_ get better.”

Archie nods, looking at the paintings on the wall. “I can,” he says, and then, a little more softly, voice low, “I will. Some day. Eventually.”

She toasts him with her ceramic mug, smiling, and when she says “Here’s to you, kid. Here’s to everything the world has in store for you,” Archie finds himself smiling, too.


End file.
